Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"Amazing Together": Mason Bates, Classical Music, And Neoliberal Values, Marianna Ritchey

Music & Dance Department Faculty Publication Series

We are all connected...one universe...one planet...one ecosystem...thriving as one network...working with one purpose...we are...amazing together

These sentiments, accompanied by images of dolphins, forests, cell-phone towers, and outer space, were projected onto screens encircling the Las Vegas Youth Orchestra as it performed at the 2014 partner summit of Cisco Systems, Inc., a multinational conglomerate specializing in networking technology. The music on offer was The Rise of Exotic Computing, a composition for orchestra and laptop by the 38 year old composer Mason Bates. The piece musically depicts synthetic computing, in which lines of code are replicated without human intervention. Thus, it …